Majorossy Judit: Egy történelmi gyilkosság margójára. Merániai Gertrúd emlékezete, 1213 - 2013. Tanulmánykötet - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, A. sorozat: Monográfiák 2. (Szentendre, 2014)
I. - Szabó Péter: A pilisi királyi erdő a középkorban
Péter Szabó: The Royal Forest of Pilis in the Middle Ages Woodland Cover in the Middle Ages I have argued above that Royal Forests in Europe were not necessarily wooded. However, we have no reason to doubt that the Royal Forest of Pilis was mostly wooded in the Middle Ages (and has remained so ever since). In this section I shall analyze the issue of woodland cover in more detail: I shall try to establish how wooded Pilis was in different periods, and whether woodland cover went through significant changes in the Middle Ages. There are two basic kinds of direct sources that could provide information: archival and natural scientific. The latter includes for example malacology, anthracology and pollen analysis. Unfortunately there is only one pollen sample available from Pilis, taken from the dried-out pond of the Cistercian monastery. Although the results are hard to interpret due to difficulties in dating and presentation, it is clear that in the Middle Ages there were open areas in the neighbourhood of today’s Szentkereszt. This, however, says little about Pilis at large. Medieval archival sources could in principle be of more help. In particular, the estimationes, a special kind of Hungarian source typical for the fifteenth century, record precise acreages of various land-use types, including woodland.51 But unfortunately not a single estimatio is available for Pilis. For want of direct sources, we need to turn to settlement history — and make the assumption that where there were no settlements in Pilis there was woodland. Such an approach can give us only a very general idea of woodland cover and its changes, but this being the only option, it is worth investigating. In contrast to natural scientific and written sources, settlement historical data are excellent for the territory. The entire area of Pilis was included in the fifth and seventh volumes of the Archaeological Topography of Hungary (MRT).52 The MRT was originally designed to gather all known archaeological details (sites and finds) of a particular territory from prehistory to the early modern times, but its authors did more than that. They consulted the written sources referring to individual settlements and they also took advantage of extensive field surveys to establish the locations of as many settlements as possible.53 These surveys were restricted to visible finds on the surface (in reality almost exclusively potsherds, a larger quantity of which is a good indicator of a settlement). Although the methodology of dating of potsherds was not very precise when the pertinent volumes of the MRT were prepared, establishing dating to within individual centuries proved possible. Combining the different sources of information, the MRT volumes compiled brief descriptions of all settlements in the given region, including those that were mentioned in written sources and those that are known from archaeological finds only. One methodological drawback should perhaps be mentioned: field surveys cannot be conducted in woodland, where the ground vegetation makes finds invisible. Whether this may have affected the soundness of the results of settlement historical research in Pilis will be discussed later on. Medieval documents mention thirty-seven settlements in Pilis. With one exception,54 they are all connected to archaeological sites. The black lines in Figure 1 illustrate their first and last appearances in the charters, making the assumption that most of them existed in the period between the two dates. The distribution of this chart suggests that the number of settlements underwent constant growth in the Pilis area: there were three settlements in 1100 and twenty-seven in 1500. However, the value of such a chart is highly questionable, taking into account the fact that the number of surviving written documents also displays the same numerical development. In other words, this chart may just as well be taken as an illustration of the growing production and survival of charters during the Middle Ages in Hungary. Archaeological finds reveal in many cases that a particular settlement existed long before its first appearance in written documents. Out of the thirty-seven settlements documented in the Pilis region, eighteen can be predated this way. For six, no comparative data is available because the settlements lie in an area inaccessible to archaeology, and one settlement cannot be located, which leaves eighteen pre-dating out of thirty cases. If we add this information (grey lines in Figure 1) to that provided by written sources, we cannot fail to see the changes. We still find written record of twenty-seven settlements in 1500 while only twelve were noted in 1100, but the number of villages for 1100 is quadrupled by the inclusion of archaeological evidence. The overall picture also undergoes modification. There were few settlements in the twelve and thirteenth centuries, followed by a sudden ‘boom’ in the thirteenth century, after which the number of settlements remained basically the same until the Ottoman invasion of the sixteenth century. 51 Szabó 2005: 47-79. 52 MRT V; MRT VII. 53 Jankovich 1993. 54 MRT VII. 205. 79
